Awe come on Steve! Your killin us, what are those drivers. What brand, what specs, what use in the cabinets. This teasing has got to stop, now I only want to see more pictures. I wanta see the wood horns! Please pics of the wood horns.

I was showing the pictures of the Decware Imperial Folded Horn to my wife last night and she said "that looks nice, I wouldn't mind that in my home." Is that great or what? The Imperials have high WAF!

thats great John , did you cover up the background to make them look smaller , i dotn have the waf to deal with yet, not gonna get married til i meet a woman who approves of this hobby, and i figure if i build a pair before i get married, she wont make me get rid of them, speaking of which, how are those blueprints coming Steve? -Matt

I am pretty lucky too! I have WAF appoval for anything i do in my basement, so that means most of my speakers will go up for sale when i build my imperials. She is NOT gonna let me lug my existing speakers upstairs to the bedroom...

I am thinking about building a pair of Imperialssince I have access to 3 different cabinet shops.(use of the equipment + discounted prices on lumber)

3/4" Birch Ply seems to be very popular for speaker cabs.

Has anybody had experience with staining Birch Ply?I know some Plywoods just do not look good stained.Veneers look like they wood be very tough to do on a Speaker like the Imperials. And Painting them would bean injustice.

Oh do I ever have experience staining burch plywood, learned the hard way you need to use a pre-stain, this way you get an even coating and avoid any blochy spots. This is my one tip for birch plywood.

You can stain birch ply the normal way, but it takes a LOT of fine sanding, and sanding, and sanding. When you get it very smooth, the results can be very good. I like the large contrast in the grain. However, if you have areas that are not quite as smooth as other areas, it will blotch.Here's my boxes made of birch ply (scroll down to just over half way down).

I wonder if a dye stain would be better than the pigment based Minwax products. I made the mistake of using Minwax on the Poplar (solid wood) I used on my Hedlunds. Lets just say, I will be painting the wood parts for sure. ;D

Do you have pics of you Helunds on the net so that we can gaze in awe? I thought I sanded real well, and I still got blotchy areas. Pre-stained helped a lot, another thing I don't like is that most plywood looks like plywood stained, it has a different grain that regular wood. I like using vineer, it is easy looks nice, and doesn't require a bunch of tools. you can sand the edges off, that works as good as a router in my opinion, a orbital is better but I have hand sanded before. Laminet is harder because it is thicker and harder than wood vineer.

Oops! we have hijacked Steves thread. Sorry Steve. We should start a thread on the speaker building forum, although this got started by how to finish the Imperial cabinets. I think putting vineer on them would cost a mint, I wouldn't, and I would use a plywood like Steve used a lighter weight wood, as light as I could get.